I'm not saying humans are good or that they're bad but I am saying we're the only ones who knows the difference between the two. If all life can be thought of as a group of people lost in the wild, the one person who knows the way is the human who possesses knowledge of morality and hence has everybody's welfare on his agenda. We are this planet's only hope of building an Edenic paradise if that's possible. Issues with overall competence and the possibility of lapsing into behavior misaligned with Edenic goals aside don't you find the peculiar position humans are in to be something we must take seriously? — TheMadFool

I agree and disagree with you. Let us check to be sure we are using the same sources of information.

My information comes from books and documentaries about animal behavior. Are you working with what is learned by studying animal behavior?

I don't think it is possible for animals to discuss concepts of good and bad as humans do, but some of them teach the young how to behave and in groups of social animals such as chimpanzees, bad behavior that is not corrected leads to being driven off. Even horses are said to teach the young proper behavior. Squirrels steal each other's nuts and know they better not get caught, so we might wonder exactly what is our sense of conscience? However, an animal is not going to reason through polluting water and people getting sick and dying, therefore, it is wrong to pollute the water.

↪3017amen
Asked and answered many months ago. Stop trolling. :yawn: — 180 Proof

I rarely pay attention to a thread that is more than 6 pages and I am not going to look for old threads before I begin one, but I can go to another forum. This one is not very friendly.

Teilhard de Chardin’s writings are forgotten in name only. . . . Don't read him; he's naughty. The Pope says so. — Banno

Oh, but the naughty parts are the best parts. :wink:

Anyway, some 21st century scientists are finding (non-biblical) evidence for Teleology (directed evolution, downward causation) in the emerging complexity of the universe. For them, Evolution is viewed, not as a random flux of atoms, but as a self-directing "cybernetic system", otherwise known as a "complex adaptive system" or a "living organism". :nerd:


Downward Causation : cybernetic evolution by "information selection and control".
From Matter To Life : Living Through Downward Causation by Farnsworth, Ellis, & Jaeger of Santa Fe Institute. A think tank for cutting edge science.
https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Life-Information-Causality/dp/1107150531/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=from+matter+to+life&link_code=qs&qid=1595179211&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-2&tag=mozilla-20

Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight : The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute
https://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Hidden-Plain-Sight-Complexity/dp/1947864149/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= — Gnomon

I like your post.

Chardin- evolution is asleep in rocks and minerals, waking in plants and animals, to know self in man.

Hi all!
A while ago I made a post in which i made clear that i'm an extreme noob when it comes to philosophy.
While having bought a history of philosophy book, I still have a few questions that I don't see will be answered by myself anytime soon. So to the question; What is the problem with the arguments that attempt to prove God? The kalam, The five ways, fine tuning, moral argument, ...

The reason why I ask is because I cannot differentiate bad philosophy from good philosophy. Neither do I know all of the intricacies of the structure arguments should have. (modus ponens, valid and sound) While there are a whole lot of people pushing these arguments. And there are also a whole lot of people pushing against them. I can't help but feel that the majority of the discussions that happen about these arguments aren't well grounded. And I'm assuming that people here know a fair deal and are able to give me a clear idea of what's wrong.

I would like to suppose that the arguments all try to deal with a deistic or theistic god.

Let me also add a subquestion to that and ask to the atheist. If these arguments are all a failure. Is that part of the reason why you are atheist?

Thank you! — DoppyTheElv

Philosophy means a love of knowledge. It has been specialized and given its own special terms that I do not understand. I am not a philosopher as many people here are philosophers. I am a pagan who loves knowledge, and when it comes to a belief in a deity, I think we should study all beliefs in deities. When we look at all the different beliefs we can see Christianity is is a combination of beliefs including Egyptian and Persian religions and Hellenism.

I think there is a huge benefit to nature-based gods and have a preference for the Greek gods and goddesses. Back in the day, everyone had a patron god or goddess, including the Hebrews who plagiarized Sumerian stories when they were in UR a former Sumerian city.

There is a theory the people of the God of Abraham came out of Eygpt when Akhenaten and his wife died. Akhenaten attempted to force on everyone, a religion with only one god. Akhenaten did this because his grandfather had ordered a search of the archives for the true God which came up as Ra the sun god. Akhenaten put religion above military concerns and this weakened Egypt and angered people, especially the military. He also put the traditional priest out of business and this frightened people and really angered the priest so when he and his wife died his holy city was razed to the ground and buried forcing his followers to flee. The idea is they entered the land that was once Sumer and researched its archives and blended Akhenaten's notions of one god with Sumerian stories, which we can read in the Torah and Christian Bible.

There is another line to god, threw the Greeks and that is the concept of " logos, reason, the control force of the universe made manifest in speech". This pops up as Jesus being the logos with god from the beginning. This line of to god is knowing god through science and it is the line to god I favor. Our democracy comes from this line but as Christians have done from the beginning they Christianized the good ideas and made them theirs. This politicization of God and tying it to patriotism is seriously problematic! Our democracy has been perverted by this and we need to correct this problem.


.

t is alas the Christian tradition to rush to judgement, notwithstanding the man saying quite clearly 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.' (Matthew 7.1)

It comes of worshipping the Great IAM, and though we are nominally a secular society, the finger wagging Christian remains in the unconscious of the supposedly rational atheist. But let us comfort ourselves with the understanding that the individual is almost entirely helpless for good or ill, and everything one might achieve is with the assistance of the mass of society and the generations of the ancestors. Those traditions that venerate the ancestors have the more realistic view, for the ancestors have de-stoned by hand every arable field that grows our crops, and laboured endlessly to glean the little knowledge we have accumulated.

Literally nothing can be done without cooperation, we cannot even feed ourselves. — unenlightened

I think you are being very nice to Christians by not mentioning the superstition.

Zoroastrianism was a Perian religion before Christianity and it imagined two forces, one of good and one of evil. This a belief in supernatural powers that got added to Judaism. It is my understanding Judaism is not polarized good and evil but a continuum of good and bad. Judaism and Christianity would then be very different religions and what happens if we remove superstition from the religion?

Romans did not have the words to convey Greek concepts and they had to invent new words before the Greek created religion could be accepted by the Romans.

I want to mention the pagan good man is not the same as a Christian good man.

Hum, I would say the op is a little heavy-hearted. The animal kingdom is full of tricksters who deceive each other and steal from each other and may even do worse things such as kill and eat a neighbor's babies. We don't have to be too morbid about our human failure to be saints, but with a light heart just accept that is the way it is and then take steps to protect ourselves and enjoy the game of life. Like in the game of Monopoly the object is to win, so consider life as a game we play to win and how much fun would it be if there were NO challenges?

PS I do not believe anyone is purely evil or purely good. Good people do bad things and bad people can do good things. It is way too simplistic to label people good or bad. I like Pantagruel answer.

Notice the difference?

I don’t reject gut feelings in their relation to thinking. I reject gut thinking in its relation to anything.

As for the rest...informative and interesting opinions, so thanks for that. — Mww

I googled to see if anyone made a connection between our subconscious and our gut feeling and I found the following link. It is in agreement with "Emotional Intelligence" and also Daniel Kahneman's explanation of Fast and Slow thinking. Our gut feeling can save our lives and if we had to think through everything, slow thinking mode, we would not survive because we could not respond fast enough.

Tragically a father a shot and killed his daughter who returned from college a day early and was hiding in her closet when he came home, thinking it would be funny to jump out and scare him. She did not anticipate he would get his gun before investigating the unexpected presence of another person. Our defense system that saves our lives can lead to terrible mistakes too. I think understanding this is important to our moral judgment. Especially if we are a juror during a trial.

Intuition happens as a result of fast processing in the brain. Valerie van Mulukom, Author provided

Imagine the director of a big company announcing an important decision and justifying it with it being based on a gut feeling. This would be met with disbelief – surely important decisions have to be thought over carefully, deliberately and rationally?

Indeed, relying on your intuition generally has a bad reputation, especially in the Western part of the world where analytic thinking has been steadily promoted over the past decades. Gradually, many have come to think that humans have progressed from relying on primitive, magical and religious thinking to analytic and scientific thinking. As a result, they view emotions and intuition as fallible, even whimsical, tools.

However, this attitude is based on a myth of cognitive progress. Emotions are actually not dumb responses that always need to be ignored or even corrected by rational faculties. They are appraisals of what you have just experienced or thought of – in this sense, they are also a form of information processing.
https://theconversation.com/is-it-rational-to-trust-your-gut-feelings-a-neuroscientist-explains-95086

PS if you feel a strong attraction to someone of the opposite sex, it could be because of how that person smells. Considering this can lead to marriage and/or children, this subconscious response to an odor can have serious consequences. You feel you are in love but you are not aware of why and act on your feelings.

On second thought, my question is not a good match for this thread so I deleted it and will put it another thread.

I don’t have any feelings about it; my feelings weren’t affected. My thinking was affected, and from that, I can say I agree with a lot of what you say, disagree with some.

Agree:
.....Enlightenment is no longer predominant; our education is bad; stress how to think not what to think; sense of right or wrong is visceral...

Disagree:
Sense of true or false is visceral; (formal) education develops us as capable moral creatures; we normally vote from feelings.
————-

Does your gut tell you this is ridiculous or maybe something that should concern us? — Athena


Only this.....

While the brain plays a part in our thinking, it does not play the most important part. Our bodies play the most important part. — Athena


....which I fail to understand at all. I suppose you mean our gut is part of our body, which I reject as it relates to thinking. From here, if it were true, it would follow that feeling controls thinking, which in turn permits thinking to be rash, irresponsible and dangerous, exactly as much as it permits thinking to be beneficial. But the former is the exception to the rule, the latter being the rule.

Anyway, I have the utmost respect for educators, especially these days, when kids are generally just punk-ass renditions of their parents. And THAT....is what my emotional intelligence looks like. — Mww

Yes, we can rash, irresponsible, and dangerous. I think that someone most of us know, who is sitting a high place, is a perfect example of that. Men of action. Don't think about it too much. It is also fast thinking, which means not contemplating what we think but reacting to say, campaign ads like one of Pavlov's dogs. I think this is important to understand for a couple of reasons.

I want to begin by establishing "gut thinking" is not my idea.

Noun. gut feeling (plural gut feelings) (idiomatic) An instinct or intuition; an immediate or basic feeling or reaction without a logical rationale. Don't think too hard about the answers to a personality test; just go with your gut feeling.

gut feeling - Wiktionary — wikipedia

Also, I want to establish awareness of thinking with our gut is a cultural matter. In the West we are under the influence of Stoicism but in Japan going on one's gut feeling is encouraged.

How Different Cultures See Intuition and Innovation - Business ...
www.business2community.com › strategy › how-differ...
Jul 30, 2019 - ... be acquired without reason or observation: a gut feeling or a sixth sense. ... This is different from Japan, where they cultivate their inner intuitive ... I think we in the West look down on intuition because it is difficult to quantify. — business2commnunity

One reason this matters, is self-awareness. Being unaware of our feelings plays into ideas of subconsciousness. One day I was hungry and didn't notice that was why I absolutely had to have a cooking magazine that was in front of my face in the store. When we are hungry it can be hard to think of anything else. On the other hand, when we are in creative mode, we don't notice hunger or the passing of time. I think our culture pushes all of us to be in our heads instead of in our bodies.

All of this goes with other cultural choices and notions of good and evil. It also goes with our judgment of philosophy, human behavior, education. One of our earliest education experts, James Williams, stressed the importance of teaching children to control their attention and bodies. The more we can habituate certain behaviors, the more free space there is in our minds for important thinking. Today it is obvious people think self-discipline is a violation of their liberty and being forced to sit still in a classroom was about industry controlling education and preparing future employees.

I say too much- I am trying to get to this point... When we realized most of us are not good at being stoic and pondering the good life, but we are impulsive and emotional, we turned away from Enlightenment goals and using education for well-rounded lives and independent thinking. We are now specializing, more reliant on memorization than logic, and lack self-control, moving us in the direction of a police state because humans are emotional and must have authority over them. Candidates and the media and producers of products put a lot of money into researching how to control our decisions and they are appealing to our lower selves and we are defenseless because we are unaware and poorly informed.

I think there are actually strong reasons for holding that, in many ways, we are more moral than before; essentially it reduces to the hypocrisy argument of the OP. I also think there are strong reasons for believing that this trend should occur: we are physically biased toward social behaviour, and intolerant of hypocritical behaviour (viz. slave-trading or -ownership, wars for resources, etc.). I find reassurance in that. — Kenosha Kid

Given our greater knowledge of cause and effect, I am confident our moral judgment has improved and will continue to improve. I think Cicero was correct about our failure to do the right thing is because of ignorance and once we know the right thing we are compelled to do the right thing.

I think this would be highly unlikely. We can't even agree on what constitutes a 'game', or where exactly the boundaries of 'here' are. The idea that our word 'good' picks out exactly one unified and inviolable concept identical in every mind which conceives it seems ludicrous. — Isaac

Really, it is a ludicrous idea? I think we have a few agreements about what is good. Most of humanity until recently agreed family order and responsibility were good. There is in general an agreement in a civilized society that we don't kill our neighbors and eat them. Do unto others as you would have them do to you, is an agreed good in all religions that I can think of. It took the US awhile but we finally agreed our food supply should be safe and making it safe and saving lives was thought to be a good thing by most people. However, right now we are having a moral crisis in the food industry and hopefully, this will change with growing awareness. So what I am missing that would make the notion that it is a ludicrous idea that we can agree about good and bad? I think not to have some of these agreements is deviant and not the norm.

What part did your body play, with respect to the judgements regarding what to cognize before exemplifying it in the writing of your comment? Your brain played the greatest part, no doubt, but I’m gonna go ahead and bet $100 you had no clue what your brain was actually doing.
————-

This presupposes the Enlightenment failed. Your intimation appears to be, that if the Enlightenment had more information about our animal nature, the tenet sapere aude which grounds at least Enlightenment philosophy, would be powerless. Hence, the Enlightenment would have been powerless. But it wasn’t.
—————-

Perhaps, but only if one thinks an understanding of nature is a.) possible, and b.) relevant. I am of the mind that the only part of nature we’re entitled to understand, is the incredibly minor part our species-specific cognitive system permits, and, moral judgements are directly related to exactly that.

Neither (...) is going to make us different from how nature has made us. — Athena


...from which it follows that the cognitive system we have, is exactly how nature made us. Better, methinks, to figure out some understanding of that, and what to do with it, then further muck things up by abandoning it.[/quote]

If you want to know more about how much our bodies influence our thinking, you might read "Emotional Intelligence". Or just ask your gut if there might be some truth in what I am saying.

When doing research on middle-age women I came across a paper that explained our visceral reaction to going against what we believe is right, such as a mother leaving her child so she can take a job outside of the home. Today mothers don't seem to have as much trouble doing this as in the past when we were conditions to stay at home and put the family first. I have a granddaughter who has very weak mother instincts, so I am not saying nature made us mothers, because a large part of that is our conditioning. The point is, our sense of true or false, and right of wrong is visceral.

Who we vote for is more apt to be based on our feelings than our reason. Campaign ads and media in general appeals to us on an emotional leave. The more something causes fear or anger the more apt we are to remember it. Trump is very manipulative in this way and I would be surprised if a Trump supporter were in this forum because his supporters tend to do very little slow thinking. Trump himself sure is not a slow thinker and that means being impulsive not thinking things threw. While the brain plays a part in our thinking, it does not play the most important part. Our bodies play the most important part.

While the Enlightenment is still with us, it is not dominating us today. Utilitarianism is dominating us, and that isn't so bad, but our education is so bad! When we used the Conceptual Method, children learned to think. Math is about learning how to use our brains, but that is not new math. It is word problems dealing with everyday math needs. It has practical use and is not as abstract as new math. I have a problem with new math for young children before they have learned how to think. I want to stress "how" to think, not "what" to think.

Now the Behaviorist Method of education is about what to think. It relies on memorization and does not involve deep thinking. It is also used for training dogs. Education for technology relies on the Behaviorist method. Now we have people barking like dogs at anything that moves, and ready to tear someone's leg off because there is little tolerance for deviation from what is right, and no doubt that right is right. This is not the Enlightenment. Back to our bodies and thinking- how do you feel about what I said? Does your gut tell you this is ridiculous or maybe something that should concern us?

Would this be natural of existential morality?

I hate to make this post any longer, but if we knew what we know today, the ongoing battle between education to make us better, thinking human beings, or education focused on practical vocational training, might have maintained the lean favoring our human developed as creatures capable of good moral judgment and human excellence. Grade school being for our souls and specialization waiting until college.

Correct, but only by me. Well......sorta correct. I appreciate the brain for its fascinating complexity, and I only care about information on how it works as it characterizes the importance other people give it.

Don’t need to understand Nature in general to discuss natural morality as a very small part of it. How does one understand Nature, anyway? — Mww

Information on how the brain works includes knowledge of our bodies and hormones and the part our bodies play in our judgment. A failure of the Enlightenment was a lack of information about our animal nature. Neither, classical information, as civilizing as it is, nor being saved by Jesus, is going to make us different from how nature has made us.

How do we understand nature? At the start of the Enlightenment, people relied either on the Bible or on the Greek and Roman classics to understand nature. Aristotle was the authority on most things and he was not always right. After many years of Scholasticism based on the teaching of Aristotle, there was a huge backlash and there was a growing argument that truth means studying nature itself, not what an authority says about it.

The Protestant Reformation was a rebellion against all authority and we were liberated to determine truth for ourselves. That kind of got messed up with education for technology and specialization. Education for technology is not exactly education for science and liberal education included education for science. I think specialization was necessary to get to where we are today, but specialization is also very limiting so now we have to pull all the different studies together. All the different ways to study nature are exhausting! We can study animals in nature and compare them to humans and we can dissect them and learn about brain structure and hormones. At the time of the Enlightenment, we did have enough information for a good understanding of nature, but our growing information has improved our ability to understand nature. And this information is very important to good moral judgment.

We desperately need to evolve into a New Age, because up until now we have functioned on very poor information. A moral is a matter of cause and effect, and that makes knowing the truth essential to good moral judgment. We are in a revolution of consciousness that will separate the New Age from the past.

Yes, religion in itself has terrible effects. I do think it is immoral to produce people who cannot discern between fantasy and reality. I consider that "harm". I merely meant that some of those things you see as effects of religion are more like effects with religion having common causes. There is an impressive correlation between religion, conservativism, prejudice, nationalism, anti-intellectualism and capitalism, but that doesn't necessarily mean one in particular causes the other. Historically, nationalism seems to stand out as the unifying force, although each will influence one another. But yes for an even more stark lesson in how religion can destroy societies, look east. — Kenosha Kid

Very nicely said. The OP classifies us as animals and goes on to explain oxytocin. At the moment I don't think a lot of oxytocin is being produced. I think Scandanavia may be experiencing more of it than the US? I don't think Trump is an oxytocin guy but more of a testosterone guy. When men watch football their testosterone level increases and our colleges spend more on football than public speaking skills and democracy depends more on public speaking skills so if we were promoting democracy we might want to spend more on public speaking? Perhaps culture has a role to play in the flavor of nationalism? AND we might want to pay a lot more attention to what stress is doing to the world? I am afraid some nations are like bombs about to go off because of the pandemic and follow economic problems.

Religion can play a huge in this depending on the flavor of religion. Oh my, you say religions can destroy societies. They are also strongly associated with war. People can turn to religion for comforting and increase the hormonal impulse to care for each other, or religion can flip people into an intense state of war. Our willingness to kill the other person is highest when we believe God favors us and will assist us in war, and even wants us to fight the war.

And Kenosha Kid, never before did I think of the relationship of our hormones, and things that cause economic collapse, and war, but now I do! This is where the OP and your post has lead my mind. And back to the notion that religion is only part of the mix. If it prevents us from understanding ourselves as animals and prevents us from working with our hormonal reality, the explosion of protest and tearing down of statues and burning buildings may continue to spin out of control. A president who is divisive and yells those in power must dominate might succeed as well as Hitler did because the state of the nation is tense, fearful, and angry- bad hormones! And this is a really good thread!

But this might be our path into the New Age, like giving birth to a child involves the pain of giving birth? I am not overly sure of anything, but think the thinking in this threat is progress.

If I understand you correctly information about how our brains work is not appreciated here. Is that correct?

You all are going to discuss Natural and Existential Morality without an understanding of nature? Perhaps I am in the wrong room?

hedonic sensations, — Isaac

What is that? A hedonic sensation? Looks like an added on judgment call that maybe should not be there? Our sensations are the same as other animals.

I looked up hedonic and I am shooked by this Puritanical understanding of being human and the lack of historical correctness.

hedonistic. A hedonistic person is committed to seeking sensual pleasure — the type of guy you might find in a massage parlor or at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

True hedonism is about avoiding pain and feeling good, but it is also directly associated with making good moral decisions because if we make a bad moral decision, that will lead to pain. It would not be a bad moral decision if the consequence was not bad. A moral is a matter of cause and effect, and as Cicero said, no prayers, rituals, burning of candles, or animal sacrifices will change the consequences of doing the wrong thing.

Read, but not studied. — Mww

That is the difference between slow thinking and fast thinking.

What I reject are beliefs about where these things come from, where they exist, what values they can have, what values they must have, what qualities they have, that proceed from no data but one person's sensations and a lot of imagination. The artefacts of moral metaphysics (and I don't just mean Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, but any metaphysical origin story for my moral values) are not present like an apple is present. My feelings are. — Kenosha Kid

My notions of our morality are based on science and the study of both animals and humans. If our morality has a metaphysical origin than that is true of animals as well. Our morals are present like an apple is present when we use science to understand them.

Yes, Anglicanism is not what Christianity once was. (Worth remembering that Christianity was the moral revolution of altruism and empathy, until it itself acquired might.) Do you believe Christianity to be the chief cause rather than just another symptom? I'm unsure. Your country was the first major secularist country in the world. You had founding fathers who were quite incredulous about the notion of God in general and of Christianity in particular. Your country was religiously diverse while remain that secular too. It seems to me that nationalism was the American illness, and Christianity one of the government's rallying points for nationalistic sentiment. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, I believe the God of Abraham religions are the chief cause of some of our most serious problems because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam mean living with false beliefs and not science. To be fair, our potential to do better is rather new to us. Not that long ago we did not have the science to do better. Unfortunately, now that we have the science to do better, we are not making the progress we could make because so many people's heads are full of false beliefs and they would rather kill than change their beliefs.

I wish our understanding of democracy was tied to the ancient Greeks and Romans, instead of talking about it as though it started with America. Then we would have a better understanding of what science has to do with our liberty and morality and the wild idea that democracy is good for humanity. Wild idea that democracy is better than religion and dependency on a king who is the human being closest to God. Our democracy in the control of Christians, and the Christian mythology about democracy coming from Christianity, prevents us from correcting our wrongs and has created us as an immoral and hated nation.

The relationship we have with Christianity now is a terrible perversion of both Christianity and democracy and this follows replacing liberal education with education for technology. You are correct about the problem. So many evils have followed the change in education. The Christianity we have now is not the same as Christianity with education in the Greek and Roman classics. When it was tied to the Greek and Roman classics it could support democracy instead of pervert it. Bottom line, it is not Christians who gave us democracy!

I am afraid I did not make myself clear about why we can not trust what we believe is true. I was talking about how our brains work, not what people believe. I think it might be important to begin with how our brains work before we argue what we believe. I think in general, humans have an unrealistic belief about the power of our brains.

Perhaps there is a conspiracy to divide the people, yet make the issues so stupid, so unimportant to the greater audience that it actually doesn't rock the boat. As you said, the true focus should be in income distribution and how we make our society better, not the nonsense of a perpetual culture war. — ssu

That would be nice. And yes there is a conspiracy to keep us ignorant, pitted against each other, and easy to manipulate with anger and fear. Education for a technological society is not education for thinking people. It is education for dependency on authority and a police state under the control of the elite.

The best tactic to stop hate is to return education to the conceptual method and back to the humanities that are essential to being civilized. We seriously need to stop relying on religion for social order because reliance on religion has promoted social and economic injustice, racism and war.

Well said. I agree with the worry about the ramifications of non-empirical moral metaphysics. I think that understanding what we are, and why we are that way, should shed light on which ethics are consistent with human society and which aren't. — Kenosha Kid

Oh yeah, it would make a huge difference! Unfortunately, especially in the US, Christianity has had a lot of control of education and has aggressively prevented the education essential to a higher morality.

There is a direct relationship between racism and Christianity and the problem with education that we have experienced, preventing our democracy from being fully realized besides having a prison system based on false beliefs and the highest number of incarcerated people in western culture. The belief system supports the military-industrial complex and the notion that our military is serving God. That is a bit of a moral problem with serious ramifications.

Not to mention, if we can rationalize with it, how can we not be aware of it? Or must we now separate being aware of, from being conscious of? — Mww

We operate in a state of illusion or delusion most of the time.

In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.
‎ — Amazon

Thinking demands huge amounts of energy and to conserve energy for most of our waking time we are in fast thinking mode. That means we are operating instinctively or habitually and on very little information. It would not be possible to function if most of the time we were not in the fast thinking mode, where our minds work with very little information.

Personally I think we should be all be working with an understanding of human nature and Daniel Kahneman's explanations of our thinking and why we make bad decisions. We might be much more tolerant of each other if we more fully understood the problems with being human. I have concerns that religious explanations of being human have been a serious problem to civilization.

I think this is problematical. Humans are plainly - empirically, even - different to any other animal, in terms of their capabilities, intellectual and otherwise, and certainly in terms of self-awareness. And that's both a blessing and a curse - a blessing in that self-awareness, combined with language and the ability to seek meaning, opens horizons of being that are simply not available to animals. And a curse, in that we can contemplate the meaning of our existence and our death. — Wayfarer

That is not the whole truth. As all other animals, our mental capacity is limited and it is the limits of our mental capacity that makes our morality a problem. If this is not understood we have serious problems with our moral decisions, laws, and justice.

We are limited to knowing about 600 people and when a population becomes larger than this we dehumanize those we do not know to cope with the overload of too many people. The result is being more moral with some people than others and more reliant on impersonal laws and the enforcement of laws that limit or completely take away our liberty.

Failure to accept evolution and the sciences that study our humanness is a very serious morality problem with social, economic, and political ramifications.

oldtimer: education was always meant to benefit the ruling elite. It is only when civilizations went from agricultural to industrial that the elite realized that the lower class/farmers needed to be educated so they could run complex equipment...and the rest is history — archaios

I have studied the history of education since ancient times and I disagree with you. Historically there have been many different purposes for education and different groups holding the responsibility of education. Scholasticism was the effort of the Catholic church and centered on Aristotle, supporting the authority of the church of course, but also lifting humanity out of the dirt and setting us up for the age of Englightenment and the return of liberal education. Scholasticism moved philosophy into science and the modern age. Liberal education is about freedom and that is why I opened this thread.

Mythology was the bases of education since mankind gathered around the fire and began telling stories. Mythology has always been about transitioning the young into adults and social bonding. That is a very different purpose of education than serving the elite.

This thread would not exist if our education had not changed from the humanistic goals to technological military-industrial complex goals.

You might be interested in Thomas Jefferson and his concern that education is essential to a strong and united public. The ideology of our democracy begins with the philosophy of ancient Athens and was developed through the age of Enlightenment and this root of the education is far from education that benefits the elite.

Where does your understanding of education come from?

You realize this is contradictory, right? Americans decide for themselves, yet schools and media tell Americans what to decide. — Echarmion

What is contradictory? You doubt that public education was used to mobilize us for WWI and WWII? You doubt that was essential to congress approving the US entering the wars? Would you like quotes from my sources of information?

That didn't change before the US entered the war. It was after entering that the US rapidly set up what would become the most powerful military in the world. They could have started that process in 1914.

What didn't change before the US entered the war? The Prussian take over of Germany following the Thirty Years war?

Thirty Years' War - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Thirty_Years'_War
The Thirty Years' War was a war fought primarily in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. It resulted in the deaths of over 8 million people, including 20 ... — Wikipedia

It'd help if you didn't paint history with a broad brush and made absurdly sounding claims like "vocational training is training for slaves".

I don't think a post the size of a book would work very well. No one would read a post that big, but providing some details of history is essential so I will.

Sure. Imperial Germany's naval expansion was the great blunder of the 20th century. But you're forgetting that, while Britain did not have a large land army, France and Russia did. And it was the fear of the "Russian Steamroller", together with the characteristically Prussian penchant for fast and decisive military action regardless of the risks, that lead to Schlieffen.

Oh please, France, and especially Russia, did not have the developed military technology of Germany.
France and Russia did not have education for technology for military and industrial purposes, any more than Britain or US did. The Prussians were so much more ahead in the war game because they understood things about war the rest of the world did not.

Please take a minute to consider what those countries thought was important about education. France was riding high on being the cultural leader of the world and when it came to war they were in the past. England's education prepared the young to be good Englishmen and they wanted to protect their social classes and rejected education for technology. The US was working with the ideology of the Enlightenment and totally focused on liberal education for citizenship. In 1917 the US adopted education for technology, but it retained education for citizenship until 1958. That is bolded because I say too much and people won't read it all and this is the most important point.

"The war of the future is a problem of economic organization of the most difficult nature and highest technological achievement, such as has never been hitherto demanded from any army. The old military qualities must give way to the organizing qualities. No doubt the courage and endurance of the individual soldier must remain for all times the foundation of military power, but organizing genius is required in order not to waste that courage and endurance. This is clearly shown from a mere examination of the colossal numbers engaged. To transport, to locate, and to feed these masses of men is the daily preoccupation of the military authorities. That they rightly understand the nature of the problem is certain, but it is very doubtful whether the problem can ever be adequately solved by commanders who are recruited from the Junkertum. Anxiety only arises with regard to their other qualifications. We know that our nation possess in its industries successful organizers, brains accustomed to direct great quantities of material and "personnel"- men who create new conditions of life for whole economic districts without having to appeal to any mystical authority. As democratic politicians, we may often have to oppose bitterly those captains of industry, but if it comes to war we shall be willing to be led by them."

I tire of my argument so I am sure readers are tired of it too, but this needs to be understood.... Cheney and Haliburton controlling oil and other resources essential to war and supplying our military. Making huge fortunes and not being part of the military. Hello America, the military-industrial complex is a fact of our lives, not just a conspiracy theory. The Prussians realized total warfare far ahead of the rest of the world and realized industry is just as much a part of the war effort as the military. In case you miss the point- industry is leading our military decisions. As Germany did, we are using our military to protect our economic interest and this is far beyond our national defense goals before the second world war. There were some exceptions in the days of colonization but today our military goals are far beyond what they once were. We bravely used force to make weak and almost primitive societies bend to our industrial well, but that is not equal to being prepared for war with our equals and competing with our equals for finite resources, and statically controling areas of the world and military essential resources.

Mention of bureautic change being a big technology change has not gotten attention. "In the past, personal and political liberty depended to a considerable extent upon government inefficiency. The spirit of tyranny was always more than willing; but its organization and material equipment were generally weak. Progressive science and technology have changed this completely." Aldous Huxley

Assigning Social Security numbers to every individual is very important to the efficient management of a population and the bureaucratic ability to manage a bureaucracy the size of Social Security would not be impossible without adopting Prussian military bureaucracy and applying it to citizens. THE US HAD EXTREMELY INEFFICIENT GOVERNMENT AND WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN CAPABLE OF RUNNING A BUREAUCRACY SUCH AS SOCIAL SECURITY. This post is too long, and so incomplete, but know it is the combined work of Hoover and Roosevelt and the crisis of the Great Depression, that gave the US Big Government.

It'd help if you didn't paint history with a broad brush and made absurdly sounding claims like "vocational training is training for slaves". — Echarmion

I will be back in a few minutes, but I just unloaded and then read your statement and I want to correct you. Liberal education is for free men. Education for technology has always been education for slaves. It most certainly is not education for free men prepared for leadership. It would be so much easier to have this discussion if people asked questions, instead of assuming things.

You're defining current US foreign policy as defending the world? Our destruction of Libya and Syria under Obama? Our futile invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Our incursions into Somalia and Niger?

I'm afraid you and I will need to agree to disagree. US foreign policy is not benign, is not about defending freedom, is not helping anyone. On Bush's watch the US became a torture regime, and under Obama the torture became institutionalized. This is wrong. It's evil. — fishfry

Assuming is not a good thing. How about our trouble with Iran begins during the Eisenhower administration because he used the CIA to create a rebellion in Iran that took out the democratically elected leader and put in his place a tyrant because the US wanted to be sure it had control of Iran and not the USSR. That was a disaster as we brought in our troops making matters worse until the Iranians rebelled again and threw us out. I would be glad to go on about the wrongs done by our military-industrial complex, and how screwed the taxpayer is and how completely powerless we are if that is what people want to discuss. But that conversation would only be pathetic venting and do absolutely nothing to make things better. I am so angry about the perversion of our democracy and the place to make a difference is education.

Had we been paying the real price of oil from the 1950's until fracking, our gasoline would have cost at least as much as the Brits were paying for gasoline and many of us could not have afforded it because the real cost of oil is the military expense of controlling it and that went sky high during the Reagan administration when we took control of the Persian Gulf and granted arms to people like Sadam.

Bin Laden did not attack the people of the US. He attacked the military-industrial complex and we should have thanked him and taken advantage of this moment to take power away from the military-industrial complex but really is that our biggist problem compared to global warming and doing to our water supply what we have done to our oil supply, and -----

Does anyone remember when we thought our constitution prevented the federal government from controlling public education? How about remembering when the government could not track us through education, banking, and medical care and now our cell phones? What do you think of having to have a government-approved ID to ride public transportation? And that wall we are building with taxpayer money walls us in and well as walling others out. No more fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft and the No Child Left Behind bill mandates schools to give military recruiters students names and addresses.

Bring it on, dump your anger here, then maybe people will start taking discussion of education seriously. This is supposed to be a philosophy forum and this thread is about the military-industrial complex and culture change. I didn't think this forum got political. We were known around the world as a nation that stood against war. Iran loved us because we helped them get rid of British control. Making America great again did not mean a military power controlled by neocons and paid for by taxpayers. And our education was based on the Enlightenment, not technology for military and industrial purpose which I have said is education for slaves and is destroying our democracy.

Yeah, so why did the media convince an isolationist populace? Idealism for democracy? Possible, but then why not enter earlier? A more likely rationale is that, apart from pro-democratic sentiment, which certainly existed, there was also the matter of all the credit given to England and France. If they lost, that money would be gone. So there was a strong economic incentive to intervene. And America's behaviour in the interwar period was almost entirely focused on their economic interests — Echarmion

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Why not enter earlier is easy to understand! Number one, in the US government, does not tell the people what to do. The people tell government what to do. This is the meaning of a patriotic defense. Only when we accept a war is our patriot duty and the will of God does our congress agree to a war. Schools and the media were used to get US citizens to agree to the war.

Industry wanted to close our schools, claiming the war caused a labor shortage, but teachers argued an institution for making good citizens was good for making patriotic citizens. We could not have done so well in mobilizing for war and maintaining the war effort without our schools.

Secondly, the US was not prepared for war. We are not appreciating the technological crisis when we were a low technology, intense labor society, and women volunteered to knit socks for soldiers, and children used their lunch money to buy US bonds. People are thinking of war as we know it today, but this is how we came to know war because of Prussia. What we have today is very different from the past.

The Prussians took control of Germany following the 30 years war, and they central public education and focused it on technology for military and industrial purposes. The US did not have the typist, mechanics, and engineers need for modern warfare, because our education was about citizenship, and Americanizing immigrants, not vocational training. We did not have the trained manpower for a modern war.

Likewise, England's education was about character and being a good Englishman. It rejected Germany's education for technology because education for technology is a great social/economic leveler and England wanted to protect its classist society. The US education was about transmitting a culture, not about vocational training. The US did adopt Germany's education for technology in 1917 and this was a wonderful thing as it led to our growing middle class. Education for technology is vocational education and has always been for slaves. Our liberal education was for free men. Now we are back to education for slaves and we are in a cultural crisis. We don't care enough about education to understand such things. I doubt if anyone here has paid much attention to education. I am spent years studying this stuff, and because what I say is not in agreement with what everyone knows, I the person who doesn't know what she is talking about.

[qoute] I recommend "The Sleepwalkers" by Christopher Clark. But that all the european nations where gearing up for war in the early 20th century really is common (among people interested in the period) knowledge. You can probably read it on Wikipedia.
[/quote]

When the library opens I will check out the book.

I recommend "The Sleepwalkers" by Christopher Clark. But that all the european nations where gearing up for war in the early 20th century really is common (among people interested in the period) knowledge. You can probably read it on Wikipedia.

I will check it out.

Some countries were colonizing and using military force to defend their colonies. However, if they had been preparing for war, things would have been very different. I will allow Sarolea to explain.

"Under present conditions of international relations, as a continental Power, Germany needs no powerful navy but needs a powerful army. In at least one definite sense it may be said that to Germany the army is essentially defensive. On the contrary, England, as an insular and maritime Power, needs no mighty army but needs a mighty navy. In the same special sense to England, the navy is essentially the defensive weapon. To put the position and mutual relationship more clearly; if to-morrow England started raising a powerful army of 500,000 soldiers, assuming that it could not conceivably be directed against France and Russia, but that it could only be used in alliance with France and Russia in a joint attack against Germany, Germany would legitimately take alarm; and she would naturally argue that England would not make such tremendous sacrifices merely to send out an eventual punitive expedition to Nigeria or China. She would assume that England was preparing for an attack on Germany. And in just the same way when Germany is adding to her formidable army a formidable navy, which could only be used against England, she cannot wonder if her naval policy gives rise to the gravest apprehensions and if the English people draw the inevitable inference that Germany, if not indeed contemplating an immediate attack, is at least preparing for such an eventuality when she judges that its necessity has arisen".

Do you see a difference between colonial behaviors and the major powers paring for war against each other?

It's really not that complicated.

Generation 1 are responsible for bringing up generation 2 to cope well with whatever is thrown at them.
If generation 2 fail to cope (come up with bad policies in response, or fail to reverse bad policies after they're no longer appropriate), then generation 1 has done something wrong (or failed to do something right).
Generation 2 are responsible for bringing up generation 3 to cope with whatever is thrown at them...

I don't understand why you're having such trouble comprehending such a simple concept.

If generation 2 implement, or fail to reverse, policies which are bad, then generation 1 has failed in their task of preparing them for whatever is thrown at them.

If such a situation has occurred (and I agree it has), it is patently foolish to look back to the approach which absolutely, without doubt, lead directly to where we now are. We have to change something about the previous approach otherwise we will just re-run the same process.

It's like you're setting a ball rolling down a hill, you're fine with it near the top whilst it's going quite slowly, soon it gets out of control and starts running away from you. Your solution is just to take the ball back to the top of the hill because you liked it there. But we know exactly what will happen if you start the same ball rolling down the same hill the same way. It will be fine for a while and then start running out of control, just like it did last time.

As for your faux offense, any complaints about the state of affairs implicitly blames someone (even if only of dereliction). If you want me to say nothing about the fault in your generation, why do you get to harp on about the faults in mine, or my descendents. — Isaac

Are you a parent? How old are your children? Most of us understand conditioning our children to be good children and that is about all we know about parenting. I have not found a child who could comprehend what talk about and without that discussion it is not possible to begin the discussion on what needs to be done. I am not convinced the necessary discussion can occur with you and you think you know a lot and appear to have some interest.

Even if a parent and all the children in that family understood what I am saying, they would be powerless to do any more than share the information with others and hope they join the effort to raise awareness and plan for something better. I have been trying to do that for many years and you can see how well that goes. The world is full of uninformed people who insist I do not know what I am talking and that prevents a discussion from going any further. So now please tell me what I can do to save our democracy and liberty. Take the responsibility. I am glad to give it to you.

You do not know as much as you think know, especially not my opinions about education past, present or future, and the discussion would go much better if you stopped assuming and started asking questions. Do I think the Dick and Jane early readers were the best books? No! Dick and Jane and all the other test books were racist and sexist!

Or wait. Just give me 8 democratic principles. Most older books list 10 or 12 principles so if you are literate surely you can tell us 8 of them. Explain what morals and science have to do with our liberty. If you can not do these things, you are not ready to prepare your children to defend the republic our forefathers gave us. If you are willing to take the responsibility you say I should take, and can not answer the questions, what are you going to do about that?

Germany, in world war 1, didn't "swallow up one country after another". They didn't even get to Paris. America entered that war not to protect it's democracy, but to protect it's economic interests. [/quote/]

Laugh, I could have sworn the glass was half empty but it you insist it is half full, then I guess that is true.

"We have seen how the Kaiser's marvelous soldiers carried their banner to the very outskirts of Paris an August and September, 1914. It is the Great God efficiency, to which the Germans were required by their commanders to pay homage of worship-and it behooves us either to effect a thing that will operate as well or to copy theirs. The fact of the world at war has silenct the erring lips that declared against the necessity for preparation against disaster, like that of Belgium and Servia." J.A. B. Sinclair 1917 NEA Conference.

There is no way the US would have entered the first world war if schools and the media had not convinced the population that the US had to defend democracy. The US was isolationist and did not want to get involved. The US was protected by an ocean in the west and an ocean on the east and did not feel threatened by a land invasion. The technology for airfare was not well developed. It did not have enough trained typists, engineers, mechanics for war and didn't have that many people enlisted in military service.

There was a lot of defending of colonies but that was far from being prepared to fight off an invasion with an army equal to Germany's army. Theodore Roosevelt entered a war with calvary. LOL That is comical compared the German military technology. Prussians changed the nature of war and I can not think of a nation that was keeping pace with the Prussians.
— Echarmion

All of Europe was mobilizing for war in the early 20th century. That's a major reason there WW1 started.

Please share your source of that information so it can be discussed. There was a lot of defending of colonies but that was far from being prepared to fight off an invasion with an army equal to Germany's army.

The problems around the world are challenging and I am not sure what part in them the US should play? But we can know this is not the first time a democracy became a defender of the world. Our history pretty much parallels Athens's history. Athens's education also changed and became focused on technological correctness, while alarmed people spoke of the end of the Athens that was. Athens overstepped its boundaries and was taken down by Sparta and eventually Sparta collapsed because it's a population declined too much to defend itself.

I am concerned that our push for technology was necessary at one time, but it lacks wisdom. The 1958 National Defense Education Act was to expire in 4 years, and obviously that did not happen. We neglect history and do not have the perspective we need for good judgment. I think our expectations of technology were unrealistic and that we need to rethink our direction and where we want to go from here.

I don't doubt your intentions, but raising conciousness (whatever that is) is not the same as taking responsibility.

What have I said that you do not believe is true? — Athena


That's simple...

we are what we defended our democracy against. — Athena


No one else made us do this, so we obviously did not defend our democracy against anything.

that past education promoted independent thinking and literacy and a culture essential to our liberty. — Athena


This is self evidently false because if the past education promoted those things then those emerging from it would not have created the society we have today, would they?

Only when democracy is defended in the classroom is it defended — Athena


Again, self evidently false because democracy was defended in the classroom and it lead to a generation of teachers and leaders who no longer defend it in the classroom.

Since 1958 all those not going on to higher education have been cheated out of the education they need to self-actualization. — Athena


Again, self-evidently false. Pre-1958 education cannot possibly have lead to self-actualization because it produced the very people who came up with and implemented mechanical industry-serving post-1958 education.
21 hours ago
Reply
Options — Isaac

Ah did you get when we entered the first and second world wars, we most certainly did defend our democracy in the classroom and we stopped doing this in 1958 when the National Defense Education Act was passed? I know this because I buy the old books about education and the textbooks. The reason for this change is in the past our national defense depended much more on patriotism than technology.

Everything I am saying is about war and education and how the two go together, and the social, economic, and political ramifications of how military technology changes public education

When I say the change in education has made us what defended our democracy against, you said

"No one else made us do this, so we obviously did not defend our democracy against anything."

That seems a strange thing to say. We would be speaking German if at the beginning of WWI we had not rushed to bring our nation up to the level of German military technology and this includes bureaucratic technology that has radically changed politics! In 1916, our education had nothing to do with technology and vocational training. It was all about literature and culture. So here we are in lulla land totally unprepared for modern warfare, and Germany was swallowing up one country after another. This technology is as much about bureaucratic technology as it is about weapons.

"The German military organization is the world's model, at least from the standpoint of immediate accomplishment of results, and therefore we can hardly do better than to emulate it in its perfect working.....
There had developt in Europe and in America, among those active in the cause of universal peace, a trend to discredit the military service and by every means discourage young men from entering the services of their countries in their armies and their navies."

" J. A. B. Sinclair 1917 National Education Association Conference. There was no National Education Association before the urgent need to mobilize our nation for war.

Charles Sarolea wrote a book warning the world Germany was mobilizing for war and his book was ignored until WWI began.

In 1958 it was the USSR and nuclear warfare threatening us. Our national defense depends on us staying ahead of others in this arms race.

World events demanded we imitate Germany and become the most powerful military force on earth, or do you have another idea of how we could deal with that reality?

Now about my responsibility exactly what do you think I should have done? At first, there was no internet so I could not raise awareness. I have been on the internet for several years now, only be attacked, banned, hurt again, and again. Everyone seems to want to prove me a conspiracy idiot and how wrong I am, and if that does not silence me, I am banned from forums. I PROMISE YOU, MY SENCE OF RESPONSIBILITY HAS MEANT YEARS OF BEING HURT AND COMING BACK TO TAKE ANOTHER BEATING. I was hoping this forum would be different but here I am defending myself from someone who wants to blame me for what happened and says I don't know what I am talking about.

I want you to know statements like this

"This is self evidently false because if the past education promoted those things then those emerging from it would not have created the society we have today, would they?"

hurt me deeply.

How many years do you think you could care so much about something and keep trying when people who have never read a book on the subjects of Germany, bureaucracy, and education attack you like that? Why would you tell me to be responsible and then tell me how wrong I am?

Our lives were not all about money before the war and we did respect our elders, and no one of quality would be as disrespectful as you. Lawyers were lawyers because of a love of justice, and doctors were doctors because of a love of healing, and teachers were teachers because of a love of our nation and teaching, and reporters thought they were defending our democracy with their reporting. You didn't live that past so why do you think you know it? Disrespectful- know nothing know it alls, are our cultural crisis and if I can not change this, I will be glad to leave this planet.
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I certainly didn't mean to put you on the defensive but I have the curiosity and sense of wonder of a child.

I don't think I want to be judgmental about the good or bad of military research, but was looking for denial or confirmation of what I am reading in books about the military and industrial take over of higher education. This is about cultural change, right?

A democracy needs people to be generalists so we have some idea of the meaning of things we vote on besides our own personal interest. When we are generalists we can all talk about the issues and work together to reason through things. According to the books, specialists tend to have their own jargon and that leads to others not understanding what they are talking about. Specialization goes with ideas of superiority and inferiority and this can become very unfriendly. I think when we specialize, we develop social and political problems?

Your generation (my generation to an extent, I'm well north of 50) raised the very people currently taking that power away. Why aren't you prepared to take any responsibility for that?

All you've done is listed a whole load of stuff wrong with current society, much of which I completely agree with, but you hark back to a time when things were 'better' in some way. My argument is something in that generation caused this state of affairs.

The people responsible for creating and maintaining the state of affairs you're lamenting were raised by the generation you're treating with reverence. They can't possibly have been that great, they raised a generation of monsters. — Isaac

Excuse me, I have taken responsibility for raising consciousness ever since I realize what happened and why. That has been about 40 years. Exactly what do you think I should be doing? LOL perhaps you think I have a lot more power to change things than I do?

What have I said that you do not believe is true? And how many people do you think have the information I am providing because only a huge and united mass, with infromation, can make a difference? The Germans didn't see anything wrong until it was too late. How is any generation of Americans supposed to do better than the German's did, and where are they to find the necessary information, or why should they even know they need to look for it?

Sure, simple conditioning works better for training dogs than having long discussions with them. I've had long discussions with my very smart dog, and I can report that it didn't improve her behavior one wit (she was, of course, a very good dog).

It happens to be the case, like it or not, that human beings, dogs, monkeys, rats, and crows share many neurological characteristics. That's why we also learn in ways not much differently than other animals. Psychology's first big (and successful) project was to understand how we learn. So it is that the methods of the rat lab became the 'image of psychology'.

In saying that, please note, I am not equating a human mind with a dog's mind. The scope of human mental activities is far vaster than a dog's, and our brains are far more complex, and utilize additional methods of learning, knowledge acquisition, imagination, and so on and so forth.

Hey, Athena: I think we share a lot of discomfort, dissatisfaction, and disagreement with the world as it has been made. My disagreement here is that there are just more villains than the Military Industrial Complex. — Bitter Crank

I think the problem is a failure to understand the Military-Industrial Complex.

I would not be making my arguments if the first day I walked into a second-hand book store to find a book that listed the American values all children learn, I had not walked out with a copy of the 1917 National Education Association Conference and Charles Saralea's 1912 book "The Anglo-German Problem". Germans are fascinating people! While in the US our domestic education was about citizenship and culture, the German education was all about science and technology. In 1917 we added vocational training in a rush to catch up with Germany and have enough typists, engineers, and mechanics for modern warfare, but not until 1958 did we more fully adopted their model of education.

The US was basically a nation of innocent children living for a love of God. While the Prussians who took control of Germany were living for the love of military might. Can you imagine this? It is explained in several books, that verify each other.

As war came to involve everyone it became a complex organization touching every aspect of a civilization. Every aspect. Germany was the first nation to nationalized workers' compensation, health care, and a pension plan. Look at veteran's benefits in the US and perhaps think about what happened to Rome when military leaders began ruling Rome. Historically military men have taken care of their own, and Germany applied military bureaucracy to the whole of Germany. This includes all the social benefits the allies did not have! It includes Social Security and everyone having a number, a very handy thing for the state to have when it goes to war. Imagine war without numbering people and things. How important do you think those numbers were in the Civil War compared to how important they are to modern warfare. Number and document. Number and document. This is a little cultural change compared to telling "his story" in the past. Imagine history being a number, not a name.

If I write too much no one will read, so I hope I have sparked some interest that opens the way to say more in another post. The point is the Military-National Complex is about the organization of a nation, not just a separate branch of the government.

Obviously it didn't because the generation it produced contained and supported the institutions responsible for the very industrialisation of education you're complaining about. How can you claim they were successfully inculcated with a "culture essential to our liberty", and in the very same argument accuse them of designing a system to train illiterate robots? Is designing a military-industrial education system something which you find to be essential to our liberty? — Isaac

I remember, no matter if I was dealing with a store, a medical facility or a bureaucracy, my information was private, and I was treated as though the decisions were mine, not some assholes policy that serves the businesses we must deal with and not us. My generation is horrified by what has happened to our personal power and perhaps if this thread continues long enough there will be a better appreciation of the culture we have destroyed.

It is important to understand the change is both education and bureaucratic. We have been disenfranchised and lost so much personal power, it is hard to think of a reason to defend what we have become. We can't do anything today that is not controlled by a policy that we had no say in making. My grandmothers generation would not go along with what has happened to us. I so remember the day she walked away from a teaching job because the administration interfered with her discipline of a student.

Not that long ago, we did not marginalize people because of what is in a criminal of credit file. Our laws protected our privacy and our government could not track us through our education, banking, medical care. Only our libraries refused to open our private records to the government. This is not the democracy we defended in two world wars.

Now please, what you are speaking of when you say "designing a system to train illiterate robots". Where did you get that information? I know there is a very popular book about education that misleads our understanding of past education and I am fully ready to argue from past books that make it clear, our teachers who became teachers around the time of the first world war, fully believed they were defending democracy in the classroom and preparing each individual child for life by helping each one discover his/her our interest and talents. Since 1958 all those not going on to higher education have been cheated out of the education they need to self-actualization.

In the past, we judged people by their character and virtues, not by their technological merit.

I welcome your arguments.

What of the external stimuli that allowed such a system to be created by its constituents? Surely it wasn't merely the gilded education system of the post-war boom that pushed American society from the good old days to the living hell it is now? And your argument holds the implication that there ever was a 'good ol' days'. Most famously, Emmet Till was lynched in 1955, McCarthyism ended the year before that, and people lived in constant fear of nuclear annihilation.
I suppose the idea I'm trying to forward is that living in what our parents & grandparents most definitely saw as a hellscape caused them to want to try to create a utopian society, or at least one safe from Soviet and racial threats (those being the most obvious in my mind). And that society, which was designed to survive the Cold War, brought on its own set of issues. — deb1161

Oh my goodness my mother would sit up in her gravy and applaud you if she could. I absolutely love what you said. May I quote an old text?

"A democracy thrives upon criticism. When a free people, alert to change, studies its institutions to make them serve more richly the aspirations of the common man, it necessarily discusses the points at which improvements seem to be needed. On the public forum and in the national press interested citizens concentrate their attention upon defects in the democratic pattern to the extent that a Martian observer might draw the conclusion that, in the opinion of its followers, democracy is a failure.

What the observer does not understand is that the public critics accept the fundamental principles of democracy so completely that they do not argue about them. The purpose of public criticism is to improve the ways and means of carrying out these fundamental principles and not to destroy them."

From the "Democracy Series" a grade school level series used in the 1940's to mobilize us for war.

Today, I don't think anyone could list 8 of the democratic principles that can be found in old textbooks. I came to collecting old books about education and textbooks because when my school teacher grandmother died, I wanted to know what it meant to defend democracy in the classroom. Only when democracy is defended in the classroom is it defended, because the defense of our democracy and liberty depends on each one of us. Our military force can not defend our democracy. We have perverted our democracy exactly as the republic of Germany was perverted by the Prussian love of military might.

The first major military take over of education was in 1917 when we mobilized for the first world war. Because our national defense depended on patriotism, education for citizenship remained a priority until the military of technology of the second world war. Air warfare and the nuclear bomb made the rapid development of military technology essential, and all the businesses that had war contracts with the government very much wanted the Military-Industrial Complex. But in 1917, the world was in crisis because Germany was more technologically advanced than any other nation, and especially the US was far behind modern military technology. Today patriotism has little to do with our war capabilities because our military technology requires our money more than our sons and daughters. Compare Iraq with Vietnam. Our military force depended on young men and women in Vietnam but not so much when we invaded Iraq. The focus of modern warfare is technology and the ability to pay for it. Trump has improved things by increasing the exportation of this military technology. Is this the way to a better world?

The problem with your argument is the same as the problem with any "haven't things gone to pot, weren't they better in the old days" argument. Something about them good ol' days caused things to become the living hell they are now. Your lauded system of education pre-1958 can't have been that good because it produced a generation of people willing to design, implement, vote for, and otherwise allow the very system you now decry. — Isaac

It might be better to ask questions rather than jump to conclusions. However, I will use your post to open the subject of college education today, not equally being literate.

We might be able to fault what Eisenhower called our "domestic education" for promoting inequality and a status quo of privilege that is no longer acceptable? I am not sure, and that is certainly open for discussion. But for sure that past education promoted independent thinking and literacy and a culture essential to our liberty. That is no longer true. The talk today is about college graduates not being literate and not capable of forming good arguments because of the lack of education for the Higher Order Thinking Skills. There are military and religious reasons for this.

In the past we used the Athenian model for education, promoting well rounded, individual growth and we used the Conceptual Method of education. With the focus on technology came specialization and the Behaviorist Method of education which is also used for training dogs. This change brings us to the concern of college graduates being illiterate.

The social, economic, and political ramifications are huge and this brings us to Trump, a president who ignores science, neglects to gather information, and makes decisions without much thinking. A president with Wrestlemania mentality and we can watch him in the WrestleMania ring on youtube. A president too focused on the economy, and some say his own re-election, and lacking a world few essential to our position in the world leadership. To be clear this is not about Trump, it is about the education we have had and all the people who follow him. The US adopted the German models of bureaucracy and education. Now the US is what it defended its democracy against. This is a cultural and political crisis.

Infinite compositions of linear fractional transformations. Pretty much pure mathematics. :cool: — jgill

It looks like that is being discussed in other threads, but how does it apply here? I am very open to explanations.